Because Rosemary Deen is the poetry editor of Commonweal, I should begin by averring that I have never met her. But I should like to! The forty-three short essays that comprise her delightful volume Naming the Light generously open her garden, her circle of friends, her daily life, and the inner world of her meditations to her readers.
The deceptively plain, conversational style of these essays makes not only the writing, but the writer herself, seem accessible one feels impelled to swap stories of gardens and their denizens: surely Deen would appreciate my obstinate desire to coax a garden out of a desolate New Haven yard, bounded by chain-link fences and flanked by pitbulls, “Samson” and “Sophia” on the left, more bluntly named “Shotgun” on the right. How ineffectual seemed the coral bells and the columbine to improve a plot that yielded a rusted pistol when I first turned the soil. Now the renters with the deadly dogs and I have all moved on, but when I last peered into my own neglected yard, the herbs and the perennials were hanging in there still.
My divarication (to divaricate: botanically, to bran at a wide angle) illustrates one of the pleasing results of reading Deen’s essays, in which the matter—annuals, rocks, and sandy soil, old closets, indoor and outdoor tasks, mulch, edges, a terrarium, water—prompts trains of thought which reseed, won’t be dislodged, yield trash and treasures, and appear in surprising company, like the willful plants in Deen’s garden. Reading Deen prompts an imaginary conversation, which is perhaps why her book is so easy to recommend: one wants to widen the circle to make room for more responses.
A difficult book to sum up, and an easy one with which to lose track of time (reading just one more essay before folding the laundry), Deen’s collection is in fact rigorously organized into seven sections (the “week”) of thematically linked pieces. She tells us in her introduction that Year One is about “the need for green,” Year Two about “edges.” Year Three is shaped in “a span . . , between the equinoxes,” Year Four in a curve “down and up.” In Year Five the essays “are partly about how we try to keep on working with the voices from our lives talking all at once in our heads,” a topic that makes me hope that Rosemary Deen will turn next to writing a how-to manual, though the attentive reader will find plenty of instructions (including a wealth of throwaway gardening tips) in Naming the Light. But Deen is elliptical and (though never obscure) deliberately indirect: She leaves us to figure out on our own the theme of Year Seven, with its meditations on lenses and miniatures such as the terrarium, on ancient sweet pea seeds, on a rainworm and the water-logged ground he flees. The rainworm leads to an elegant discussion of water in the landscape:
In the natural course of weather, warm and cold, moist and dry do not mix but displace each other in a mutuality of opposition. I imagine my small rainworm coming to me on the weather system, perhaps created by the sun in the warm air of the equator, which spins the fastest of any part of the earth, like the rim of a wheel or the outermost whorl of a spindle. Lifted up by the incoming cool air from the north or south, he would feel the cool air beneath him lagging behind his equatorial spin, forming the trade winds going with the spin of the earth. He would sense the spindle resting on the knees of Necessity.
(I must say that sentences arranged in such a beautiful pattern, rising here with the metaphor to arrive with a solid thump at the epigrammatic last line, an allusion to Plato, please this reader in the nearly physical manner of metrical verse.) But I quoted these lines not for their rhythmic pleasure, but because they illustrate a habit of mind in which the small object, duly noticed, becomes the vehicle for meditation at least global, and possibly universal, in proportions.
Year Six, you will have noticed, I have skipped over, for in describing it Deen tips her hand: it is “renaissance in some way or other.” Renaissance in a quite specific way, actually, for the whole collection of essays resembles nothing so much as the seventeenth-century art of prose meditation practiced by divines such as Bishop Joseph Hall. Here is Hall on a subject dear to Deen’s heart, “Upon the Rain and Waters”:
What a sensible interchange there is in nature betwixt union and division! Many vapors rising from the sea meet together in one cloud; that cloud falls down divided into several drops; those drops run together and in many rills of water meet in the same channels; those channels run into the brook, those brooks into the rivers, those rivers into the sea. One receptacle is for all, though a large one, and all make back to their first and main original.
Hall elaborates the metaphorical burden of his observation:
So it either is or should be with spiritual gifts. O God, Thou distillest Thy graces upon us not for our reservation but conveyance…. Take back, O Lord, those few drops Thou hast rained upon my soul and return them into that great ocean of the glory of Thine own bounty, from whence they had their beginning.
The labels of the contemporary publishing world allow that Rosemary Deen’ s book might be “Nature / Literature,” or a garden book, or indeed “Creative Nonfiction.” As soon as we embark with the author in the first essay on a “Water meadow walk to Saint Cross,” along Isaak Walton’s River Itchen, to a twelfth-century hospital manned by a cagy attendant named Mr. Heaven, we perceive that Deen has distilled out of daily life uncommon conveyances through deep channels.
